Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Refused to Campaign for Bernie Sanders Over Joe Rogan Endorsement

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Mar 14, 2020

New reporting from the Huffington Post indicates that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had a falling out of sorts with the Bernie Sanders campaign, refusing to campaign for the democratic socialist for a time. Ocasio-Cortez was reportedly annoyed that Sanders accepted the endorsement of podcaster Joe Rogan.

Rogan is known for occasional off-color and politically incorrect jokes. This reputation was apparently enough for Ocasio-Cortez to distance herself from the Sanders campaign, after having endorsed Bernie for President in October.

Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir is said to have requested that Ocasio-Cortez campaign aggressively in support of Sanders after the Iowa caucus in New Hampshire. The New York freshman Congresswoman is said to have rebuffed the requests until a few days before the primary vote.

A Sanders campaign source was quoted as saying that “it was like pulling teeth to get her to New Hampshire.”

Ocasio-Cortez is then said to have declined several opportunities to campaign on behalf of Sanders in Nevada, South Carolina, and the following Super Tuesday states in which the Sanders campaign was resoundingly defeated by Joe Biden, perhaps losing its opportunity to win the Democratic primary.

This sort of political puritanism shows a weakness of the political left, particularly that of Bernie Sanders’ progressive wing of the Democratic Party. If an endorsement from the most popular podcaster in America is enough to alienate a major campaign surrogate, then the left isn’t really prepared to defeat the Democratic establishment.

The Left specializes in wielding cultural and institutional power, as opposed to winning control of public opinion. A serious political movement would wholly embrace the endorsement of Rogan, who quite literally has one of the most powerful platforms in the United States.

Conservatives should be prescient that their political opponents’ tendency towards thought-policing is a serious weakness.